People don’t usually think of The Lord of the Rings as an apocalyptic series, but it was. As much as it was a fantasy story about a world populated with elves, dwarves and orcs, it was about that world ending in fire and blood. Whatever we learned about the rich histories of Middle-earth and its diverse civilizations, there was always the sense that it existed in the service of something larger, and more ultimate; that it had always been building towards this final, fateful story.
The Hobbit always had more modest aims. It was a 300-odd-page children’s book with a plot that read a bit like a D&D campaign of moderate difficulty. If the Lord of the Rings trilogy was the tale of a tiny person who had the biggest adventure of all, The Hobbit is the story of numerous tiny people who had … some relatively exciting times. Sure, it has adventure, intrigue, and a dragon — but on the Lord of Rings Richter scale of epic fantasy, it rates about a 5.0. This isn’t a story about saving the world. It’s about a bunch of dwarves on a side-quest for some loot. And there’s no shame in that; the real shame is that it’s not allowed to be that alone.
Like many franchise films, director Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug suffers from crisis creep: the tendency for each successive film to justify its existence by being bigger, darker and more epic — forever escalating in a narrative Shepard tone[1] that inevitably yields diminishing returns. If Spider-Man saves the city, Iron Man has to save the country, the Avengers have to save the universe, and Thor has to save all the universes.
Given the big-things-in-small-packages themes that infuse J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, it would be not only more faithful but more fitting to step back and simply tell the smaller story – to ignore the conventional wisdom that says something has to be big in order to be valuable. But The Hobbit is not only a franchise, it’s a capitol-F Franchise, the kind where you go big or go home because that’s what sells tickets. And no matter how Lord of the Rings-light these movies are, they exist as a trilogy primarily to make enormous amounts of money.
The Hobbit movie series may be trying to stretch 300 pages into three films, but at least we’ve reached an interesting hundred pages. While it’s hard to separate The Desolation of Smaug from its overblown structure, The Desolation of Smaug is still a notable improvement over its predecessor, if only because we’ve finally hit the rising action in the story’s narrative arc. Like a pop song song slowed down[2] to an unrecognizable crawl, this is where the film finally reaches its shimmering, cold honey chorus – so slow and warped it bears little resemblance to the original, but often very pretty nonetheless.
For all the effort it spends trying to warp itself into a Lord of the Rings prequel — rather than a side story — The Desolation of Smaug is at its best when it lets itself be as small and secondary as its source material. There’s a moment when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) climbs a tree in the Mirkwood and pokes his head above the leaves to find himself surrounded by a forest so vast it’s impossible for him – and his quest – not to feel miniature. When we reach the home of the Wood-elves, we glimpse elven culture not just in relation to other races, but to itself, with its internal class distinctions and cultural celebrations and get to spend more time in the world of men – not in their halls of glory, but a small trading community full of its own struggles. It’s nice, even if it’s short-lived.
As the schemes of Sauron gain steam in the background, the orc commander Azog gets summoned by Sauron and told to delegate his dwarf-killing mission to someone else, because they have more important things to do than chase a bunch of inconsequential characters around a forest. It’s a moment that could — and should — have been emblematic of the film’s role as a companion story. Instead, the subplot between Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the forces of Sauron gets wildly extended, continually forcing the movie’s attention back on the “big picture” — you know, the one we already watched ten hours of movies about.
As a director, Jackson has always excelled at creating the sort of sweeping vistas you want as your desktop background, the evocative landscapes your imagination wants to journey inside. This film is no exception. It’s the journeying – particularly in terms of action – that proves to be the tricky part, especially when its “more is more” philosophy comes into play.
There’s an action sequence where the dwarves end up floating down a river[3] in empty barrels while pursued by orcs, who are in turn pursued by elves. It sounds thrilling, and it is – initially. After watching the dwarves spin through the air while arrows fly wildly around them, landing over and over in the most improbably perfect ways, it starts to feel more like a carefully constructed Rube Goldberg machine than a battle.
Yes, action sequences are almost always improbable by nature, but the reason they thrill us is they feel both dangerous and exceptional. Remember in the original trilogy, when Legolas (Orlando Bloom) pulled a series of arrows from his quiver and shot them so inhumanly fast that it almost made his enemies appear to be moving in slow motion? It was so cool. If you liked seeing it once, surely you’ll enjoy seeing it over and over and over, right?
It’s kind of like watching a magic trick repeated: the first time, you wonder how the magician did it; the third or fourth time it starts to feel like a trick rather than a feat; and by the end, you’re simply bored. It doesn’t seem they’re fighting orcs so much as performing a choreographed dance of about it. A man seated at the end of my row actually slept through most of the movie — even during the booming, smoky dialogue of Dragon Benedict Cumberbatch. Although I had no problem keeping my eyes open, I understood where he was coming from.
The sense of narrative disengagement isn’t helped by the omnipresent CGI. Like the Star Wars prequels before them, the Hobbit films are largely greenscreen creations whose visual excitement ends up tumbling into an uncanny valley of action — that trough of disbelief where the easier it is to render incredible feats, the less they mean. The bulk of the movie feels too flat, too effortless.
Some people won’t care about any of this. Fair enough, because The Desolation of Smaug delivers exactly what it promises: More. Someday, when all the box sets are released, The Hobbit trilogy will pop up on Amazon below of every Tolkien-related product with the words “If you enjoyed The Lord of the Rings, you might like…” Because isn’t that the point? Sometimes when you really love something, all you want is more, even if it’s less.
References
- ^ Shepard tone (en.wikipedia.org)
- ^ slowed down (www.youtube.com)
- ^ dwarves end up floating down a river (www.wired.com)
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